The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001-07.
Cutter, Charles Ammi
1837–1903, American librarian, b. Boston. Cutter cataloged the library of the Harvard Divinity School and in 1860 was appointed as the assistant to the librarian of Harvard. As librarian of the Boston Athenaeum (1868–93) he was a pioneer in subject cataloging. The Athenaeum catalog (5 vol., 1874–82) served as a model for later dictionary catalogs. His Rules for a Dictionary Catalog (1875) was the first work of its kind. Cutter’s system of classification, Expansive Classification (1891–93), used the alphabet instead of numbers; it was the basis of the Library of Congress classification. From 1893 until his death Cutter was librarian of the Forbes Library, Northampton, Mass.
